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Within the arena of selfless service, and of giving in general, there is no more profound act than that of feeding living beings. Within this realm of earthly existence, our life is sustained primarily through eating food. If our bellies are rumbling or we are struggling every day to put bread on the table, then it becomes very difficult to think about things like spiritual evolution and grasping the essence of non-dual truth. Therefore, to offer food to another living being means to nurture them at the very root of their existence. Unlike many of our cultivated pleasures, which usually revolve around simply distracting ourselves from our own ambient existential discomfort and fear, the need to eat is incredibly real.
Because the act of eating is so fundamental to our existence here on Earth, to offer service through feeding actually has the greatest impact in terms of thinning out our load of negative karma. The most severe karmic issues that we can have, both in terms of our present lives and the genetic lineages from which we inherent our physical bodies, all relate to violence and inflicting pain on others. Acts of physical violence, murder, torture, rape and preventing other beings from meeting their basic physical needs – these are the things that leave the largest karmic stains. For instance, even to be born within a certain family, in a certain area, in a certain country, where there was a history of genocide, can mean that we inherit a part of the collective karma that was accrued when those acts of genocide were being committed. Thus, the best thing that we can do to reverse the negative karma related to prematurely ending the lives of others, is to prolong, sustain and give life through making sure that other beings are well fed and physically healthy.
When we selflessly feed beings of the earth, air, water, or our even our owns species, we are giving life, we are contributing a small amount to the basic foundation of material existence from which all the more advanced modes of spiritual evolution necessarily emerge out of. Solely in terms of dissipating negativity and suffering both in terms of our own lives and the lives of our families, there is no higher practice than feeding other beings.
Within the contemporary Dattatreya Tradition, Lord Dattatreya is worshiped simultaneously as the supreme consciousness and as the natural world. When we see Lord Datta as living within every single particle of the natural world, it becomes impossible to view him as any kind of abstract or otherworldly deity that is always ‘somewhere else’.
If the principle towards which we are aiming within our spiritual practice becomes abstract or unclear, then our practice will also become abstract, ineffectual and basically useless. By seeing Datta as the ultimate transcendent principle as well as the very soil and earth that we stand upon, it is possible for aspirants within the Dattatreya Tradition to maintain an integrated, grounded view of spirituality rather than one that is escapist or even hallucinatory. When we evolve within the Datta path, we are to constantly bring everything that we take from the higher realms in the forms of realisation, knowledge and power, back down to the ground in order to selflessly serve and benefit all of the children of our Great Mother Earth.
Thus, within the Datta Tradition, because we perceive the natural world as Datta himself, or the direct harmonious expression of the supreme consciousness, the very act of feeding beings of the earth, air and water is directly equivalent to feeding or making an offering to Lord Datta.
Spiritual practice should be regular. If we are trying to cultivate a non-violent attitude, then we should be aspiring to become more observant of our violent tendencies every day. If we wish to engage in selfless service, then we should focus on consistently maintaining a disposition of benevolent, selfless giving. Likewise, in terms of feeding beings, we should certainly seek to find a way in which we can engage in this practice regularly and actually make it a standard part of our daily lifestyle.
One good way to do this, if we have a garden, or even a balcony, is to simply feed birds by filling up a bird feeder or offering some crumbs of bread every day. As an extension to this, we could also set a regular day once a week where we go to visit a water body to feed fish.
In terms of feeding other human beings, when we find homeless people, instead of simply ignoring them, we can offer to buy them a cup of tea or a sandwich. If we live in a busy city, where beggars approach cars, we can also carry packs of biscuits so that we are ready to feed them as well. To really practise feeding properly, we should become totally indiscriminate in the way in which we offer food to other beings. When people ask, we give. And even they don’t ask, we can still offer.
To offer food to sustain the life of other beings is really the first and most significant step within the overall sphere of selfless service. By having the foundation of feeding people physically, we can continue to build a larger practice of feeding people spiritually by offering information of a spiritually uplifting nature that will bring benefit to them. But, to begin with, we should simply make sure that we feed some kind of being of the earth, air, water, or another human being, every single day.
Additionally to this practice of feeding embodied beings, we can also mentally offer food to our departed ancestors, and also to whichever spiritual figures we are connected to, before eating. If we have an alter with pictures of our ancestors along with images of elevated spiritual Beings, then we can physically offer a small bowl of food there before we eat, or we can also simply offer the totality of our food mentally to both ancestors and masters together before we eat.
Written by Jack Barratt
© MyDattatreya 2021 All rights reserved
Designed by Tamara Lj.